Just not very much time.
For most of the drive back to Vegas, I didn't think much of anything. I felt tired, not just in need of sleep, but truly weary. The stitches in my side and forearm hurt, and the skin along my left palm had begun to itch in earnest, now that my hand was starting to heal. When I'd been swinging the bolt cutters, I'd maybe been swinging harder than I should have done.
I stopped for a meal at a diner on the way back to my hotel because I felt I should, rather than because I had any appetite for it. There were multiple racks of free newspapers, nothing more than collections of ads, just inside the entrance, almost all of them telling me that women with names like Juliette and Morgana and Devyne would be happy to take my money to make me happy. A couple of the ads actually used words like "fresh" and "young" and even "barely legal."
It made me think of Kekela, and then I was thinking of Tiasa yet again. When my meal came, I found I couldn't even bring myself to take a bite of it. I paid, left, picked up more water at a convenience store, and finally returned to my room.
I didn't know what to do next.
There were options, of course. Kekela had spoken of the "mongers" when we'd visited Rattlesnake, the men who frequented whores, who made it a game. There were mongers everywhere, certainly here in Las Vegas. With a couple of days, I could probably locate a few. With a couple of weeks, I could maybe earn their trust enough to find the specialists, the ones who knew where to find girls so young that, even in a state with legalized prostitution, they remained hidden.
Or I could head back to Amsterdam. I could chase down Mesick, see if there was something I'd missed, something he had held back. I could go further, to Trabzon, and renew my acquaintance with Captain Celik, and hope to grab more time alone with Arzu Kaya. I could rewind the clock all the way to Georgia, and hope that Mgelika Iashvili knew more than he'd said, had one last crumb for me to follow.
Or you could let it all go, I told myself. You could just walk away.
But even thinking that, I knew that I couldn't.
One month of chasing after Tiasa Lagidze had led me here. Four weeks that had shattered the life Alena and I had built for ourselves, and in so doing, had also destroyed the walls I had put between the man I had been and the man I had become. Iashvili had said we were the walking dead, Alena and I, and he'd been right, but not in the way he imagined. Like Bakhar Lagidze, I hadn't left my past behind; I'd tried to bury it, alive and kicking, and it had come back on me the same as it had come back on him. Ten men dead by my hand in Batumi and Dubai was the proof.
Everything had brought me here, the same way it had brought Tiasa.
Bakhar. Karataev. Arzu. Mesick.
And one other person, at the end of the line. One person, and I didn't have the first idea where to look.
Bakhar. Karataev. Arzu. Mesick…
It hadn't just been any supply chain, I realized. It had been their supply chain. I'd thought that the connection had been between Bakhar and Karataev, that there had been nothing to tie Bakhar to Arzu. Yet there was Arzu connecting to Mesick, and Mesick saying he had brought girls to the U.S., to Nevada, before.
I opened the laptop, brought up Vladek Karataev's files from his BlackBerry, began going through the entries in his address book one at a time. There was nothing that looked like a phone number for somewhere in the States, certainly nothing that looked like one for Nevada. I combed through them a second time, and got the same result.
But there had to be a connection.
Bakhar's little black book was in the messenger bag, where I'd left it, and I dug it out, started going through it again. Same thing, nothing with a U.S. area code, nothing that looked like a number for Nevada. I went back to the listings from the BlackBerry, began comparing each entry, one at a time, alphabetically.
Under the, Bakhar had an entry, "Pretty." The number, at first glance, was for Ukraine, with a 380 country code prefix. The number ended in 207. When I checked Karataev's, I found an entry under the word krasivyj, which also meant "pretty." The numbers weren't identical; Karataev's first four digits were different. But like in Bakhar's book, the number ended in 207.
Reversed, the number began 702.
702 was one of the two area codes in use for the state of Nevada. I knew that, because it was on the goddamn telephone on the desk right before my eyes.
I had two possible phone numbers for "pretty" in Nevada. Whoever the hell that was. If they were still in service. If they were real numbers. If they weren't actually for somebody or some establishment in Ukraine.
Using the BlackBerry seemed like bad luck, like tempting fate, never mind how many times I had changed SIMs on the thing. I used the telephone on the desk instead, hit 9 for an outside line, and dialed the number from Karataev's listing, thinking that one would be the most current.
It rang. Four times.
Then a woman said, "This is Bella."
"Bella," I said. "I understand you're the person to talk to if I'm looking for some company."
CHAPTER
Twenty-nine A month to the day from when Tiasa had been taken, I was once again on I-15, heading the same direction I had traveled the previous afternoon, but this time when I passed the turnoff to the drop site, I stuck to the freeway for another thirty miles or so. The sun was preparing to set, just beginning to bathe the desert in red and orange, when I drove into the town of New Paradise, following the directions I'd been given along Mesquite Avenue toward the northwest side of town. Lights were coming on, a few people emerging now that the temperature was beginning to descend toward tolerable.
Calling the town New Paradise was potentially a contradiction in terms. A lot that I saw was obviously recent construction, streets of fresh pavement, and everything with a new coat of paint. A small casino, Paradise Rollers, anchored the main street on one end, new-school design with sweeping neon and elegant curves instead of a box with blinking lights. At the other end of the street was a well-watered and vibrant park, grass and trees and bushes and flowers. The water taken to maintain it could probably have irrigated a small third-world nation. It certainly all felt new.
But if Tiasa were here, it sure as hell wasn't Paradise.
There was an Albertson's at the corner of Mesquite and Sawtooth, the supermarket reasonably busy this time of day as people just off work stopped for groceries on their way home. I parked on the south side of the lot as I'd been directed to do, killed the engine. I'd been told no phones would be permitted, and so took the BlackBerry off my belt, stowed it in the glove box, and then waited. I didn't have to wait long.
Less than a minute after I'd parked, a black Town Car pulled into the space next to me, the kind of vehicle normally used by car services. Its windows were tinted. I got out of my car, locked it up, and moved to the new one, climbing into the back.
Inside were two men, one waiting for me in the backseat, the other behind the wheel. As soon as I'd closed my door, there was the thunk of the electronic locks.
The man beside me was in his late twenties, Caucasian, with black hair. He wore blue jeans and a black fitted T-shirt, and from his biceps I could see he liked his barbell set. The watch on his left wrist was bulky and expensive, maybe platinum.
"Mr. Twigg?" he asked, looking me over. I'd made a point, again, of trying to go with the right clothes for the occasion. Today that meant tan khakis and a short-sleeved polo shirt, the kind of thing a businessman closer to forty than to thirty would wear when relaxing. I wore a windbreaker as well, mostly to cover the stitches on my right forearm.
"Yes," I said. "That's right."
"Put your hands on the back of the seat in front of you, please, and lean forward."